ABOUT.
The Cooperative Community of New West Jackson (CO-OP NWJ) is an eight-block, resident-led community in West Jackson, Mississippi.
ON THIS PAGE: ABOUT | A NEW CHAPTER | OUR STORY | OUR HOOD | OUR WAY | OUR PERSPECTIVE
About
In 2013, neighbors came together around a simple belief: The people who live here should have the power to shape the future of their own community. Facing generations of poverty, chronic illness, systemic exclusion, violence, abandonment, and misguided approaches to development, we chose to rebuild from the inside out.
Through a cooperative model, we began building resident-owned enterprises, reclaiming property, strengthening ties, and creating opportunity rooted in the skills, knowledge, and leadership already here.
We organized around three shared priorities from those early conversations:
The words make it sound simple. It wasn’t.
Years of distrust, oppression, neglect, and disinvestment mean every step has required relationship building, collective problem solving, and steady rebuilding of trust. The work has never been about quick fixes. It has always been about people.
What’s Next?
More than ten years on, many challenges remain. Across Mississippi and the South, people live with chronic illness, economic insecurity, limited access to resources, addiction, displacement, burnout, and daily pressure. For years, many felt the only way to change was to leave.
In the face of all this, our communities carry generations of knowledge, creativity, resilience, and care.
Over the last decade, we made our home more livable. We built community and created opportunity. We invested in people and place.
Now we ask a different question: How do we stay?
How do we stay rooted in places we love while creating more of what we need to thrive? How do we build communities where families can imagine a future? How do we nourish not only physical needs, but creativity, relationships, health, and possibility?
That work includes continued neighborhood initiatives, plus Black Oak Farm as space for rest, reflection, creativity, and gathering, and Red Banana Books as community resource center, bookstore, and hub for learning.
For more than a decade we focused on infrastructure: homes, gardens, businesses, and assets. Those things matter. Building into the future, we turn to what is needed to stay: time, space, beauty, knowledge, connection, and the ability to imagine what comes next.
How We Started
CO-OP NWJ began when residents decided to rebuild together rather than wait for outside fixes. Our foundation is resident leadership. Our vision is a clean, healthy, safe, and prosperous community owned from within. Our values are family, neighbor labor, and self-determination. We are building new ways from the inside out and ground up.
Get to Know Us
Our ‘Hood
Quite simply, CO-OP NWJ is the people. The people who live here, who have suffered here, who continue to build here. We are the invisible. The pushed aside. While we may not be financially rich, we are wealthy with skills and knowledge in agriculture and homesteading. We live our truths rooted in historical Black experience, survival culture, and folk traditions. Now, we are the leaders, the decision makers, the active doers, and the collective owners.
Home to nearly 14,000 residents, West Jackson is 89% Black. Over the last 30 years, it has suffered deterioration and population decline. Today 41% of properties here are vacant or abandoned. We sit alongside a corridor the City designated as a Revitalization Target Area and the State designated as an Economic Empowerment Zone, placing us in the pathway of speculative developers and more external pressure.
We set priorities by capturing collective resident voice, and we stay radically open as more neighbors join. We transformed a street connected to the main corridor into social enterprises that help sustain operations and programming.
Our current focus extends that work to Black Oak Farm, a place away from the corridor for rest and gathering.
Community in action
Our Way
We treat one another as family and put community priorities before our own desires. We promote collective ownership, collective responsibility, and collective action in all we do. We value the community as more important than the individual.
Change is best driven from within, so we build on the skillsets and creativity of local members. We are our own primary labor force, and outside support builds internal capacity rather than long-term dependence.
Our community has weathered decades of well-intentioned efforts that resulted in little progress. Rather than repeat models that failed us, we take cues for pace and order from within, watching resident understanding, acceptance, and readiness. We build new infrastructure from the ground up, so formal structures reinforce the informal strengths already present.
The Way We See It
Our Perspective
Art and Culture
Our story is alive throughout our community. Through our work. Through our buildings. Through our businesses. Through our art. It is a story of our pain, our resilience, our spirit, our vision, and our voice. While we love to share it, it is for us first, so we see ourselves in every step, know our history matters, and honor what brought us here. Come and feel the difference of a community telling its own story, in its own way. It is powerful. It is transformative. And it is the foundation our work is built on.
Cooperation and
Collective Ownership
If we are going to break the vicious cycle of poverty and build a regenerative foundation for future generations, we need a renewed social practice based on cooperation and collective ownership. These values give everyone a stake, motivate people to care, and build trust and unity of purpose.
Self-Determination
and Empowerment
We understand we cannot force change on anyone. The people must decide. Our people must choose to move forward for themselves. We create an environment where people can empower themselves, with pathways that are culturally accessible and tangible.